A Maryland appeals court halted the case against a retired Navy doctor accused of fatally stabbing his wife as their polyamorous relationship unraveled while it considers a judge’s decision to remove Anne Arundel County State’s Attorney Anne Colt Leitess from the prosecution.

In a Tuesday order, three Appellate Court of Maryland judges granted the state’s request to slow the case against James Strachan Houston, who is charged with murder in the August killing of his estranged wife, Nancianne.

The appeals court judges decided they wanted more time to evaluate legal arguments about Circuit Judge Mark W. Crooks’ order that dismissed Leitess from the prosecution and prohibited her from participating in the case.

Crooks found that Leitess failed to disclose evidence favorable to the defense and “irreparably” tainted her role as a prosecutor in the case by speaking to approximately 15 witnesses alone. Ethical guidelines prohibit attorneys from serving as advocates in cases where they may become witnesses, and Crooks said Leitess had crossed that line.

Leitess solicited the assistance of the Maryland Office of the Attorney General to file a mid-case appeal of Crooks’s decision on an emergency basis. They asked the appellate court to freeze the case quickly, arguing time was of the essence because Houston’s trial was slated to begin Friday.

In the event of an acquittal, the prosecution doesn’t have a right to appeal at all. The attorney general’s office also said the trial proceeding without Leitess would nullify its appeal.

Leitess said she was conducting routine witness preparation when she spoke to Houston’s friend and neighbor, Steven Valladares, by phone on April 1.

Nobody else was present for the call on Leitess’s side, and almost all of it was a review of what Valladares told police in a recorded interview after the homicide. But then, near the end of the conversation, Valladares told Leitess that Houston once disclosed at a dinner party that his wife had pulled a knife on him before. He told Leitess he’d said as much to the police.

Prosecutors say Houston, 58, lured Nancianne, 47, to his waterfront apartment in Edgewater on Aug. 9 under the guise of completing overdue tax documents. Houston then brutally stabbed his estranged wife in the apartment, they allege. Police said they found a kitchen knife protruding from a “gaping wound” in her chest. Medics pronounced her dead.

But Houston was badly wounded during what he told a 911 operator was a knife fight with his estranged wife. Responders flew an unresponsive Houston to Maryland Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore.

His attorneys say he was defending himself from Nancianne.

Prosecutors believe Houston used his medical training to make it look like he was injured in a knife fight without risking death.

Leitess admitted she had a legal obligation to disclose to the defense what Valladares told her. She didn’t, instead ordering the lead homicide detective, Justin Downey, to conduct a recorded follow-up interview with Valladares, which Leitess said she would have then turned over to the defense. Downey did not do what Leitess told him to.

Left with a bad taste in his mouth following his conversation with Leitess, Valladares called defense attorney John Robinson to tell him the same thing he told the prosecutor. Robinson disclosed that to Crooks in court April 29.

Crooks scolded Leitess, saying Valladares’ statement could suggest Houston’s innocence or at a minimum support his self defense claim. After another hearing, he dismissed her from the case and ordered her to have no contact with whichever prosecutors would handle it thereafter.

Describing the legal question about dismissing an elected prosecutor and barring her from working on a case as unprecedented, the attorney general’s office argued Crooks’s ruling was a step too far.

“Appellate review of the disqualification order is imperative to remedy the circuit court’s unwarranted encroachment on the separation of powers by disqualifying a county’s elected State’s Attorney and strictly limiting her communications with her Assistant State’s Attorneys,” wrote Principal Deputy Solicitor General Jer Welter.

Former Maryland Public Defender Nancy S. Forster, Houston’s appellate attorney, countered that Leitess’s removal from the case did not preclude the state’s attorney’s office from prosecuting the case.

Forster likened Leitess’s actions to those of late, disgraced Harford County State’s Attorney Joseph Cassilly, who was disbarred after he left office for withholding evidence suggesting the innocence of John Norman Huffington. Courts later found Huffington was wrongfully convicted in an infamous double homicide. Huffington served 32 years in prison before eventually being pardoned.

“Unfortunately, Mr. Cassilly’s misconduct was not discovered in time to have him disqualified from the case,” Forster wrote. “Disqualifying Ms. Leitess from prosecuting Mr. Houston, however, was done in a timely and proper manner.”

The appeals court denied, at least temporarily, Forster’s request to dismiss the state’s appeal after an emergency hearing Tuesday.

During the hearing, the appellate judges questioned the merits of Crooks’ ruling. They noted that ethical rules do not bar attorneys from speaking to witnesses alone but only warn against doing so in the case of witnesses who are believed to be “hostile.”

The chief judge of the appeals court, E. Gregory Wells, was a prosecutor in Prince George’s County before taking the bench. He said he’d spoken to “hundreds” of witnesses alone.

His colleagues, meanwhile, questioned the feasibility of defense lawyers who work at small firms on “shoestring” budgets hiring someone else to be present when they speak to witnesses.

Both Houston’s lead attorney and Leitess’s office declined to comment on the ruling.